I’m in the “I need to give myself a good talking to” phase of recovering from this latest relapse. It’s the stage where I’m returning to normal and I always do that better physically than mentally. Unless you have experienced unpredictable lapses in your health, understanding the amount of mental strength it takes to get your head straight once again is hard to fathom. It’s real though, and to deny your brain the time to heal, too, is just plain silly.
That doesn’t alleviate the frustration of reclaiming your brain. The mental effects of Lyme are perhaps the slipperiest symptom of all. Quantifying mental distresses like anxiety, depression, OCD, and depersonalization can be tricky, especially if they are directly tied into an unpredictable, yet reliable pattern of illness, like Lyme. I’m not sure medication would help me, for I function quite well (translation: I hole up and hide from the world) even when my brain has walked off the job for a while. At any rate, I’m weepy and angry and sad and anxious and scattered and blank when I’m sick and then I get better. It’s that in-between phase that I inhabit right now, the sputtering back to life of the ol’ bean.
The first thing to come back is the need to ‘put things back in order’. I think I’m doing great and keeping up with everything and then I discover all sorts of stupid shit that I’ve done. Once that’s sorted out, I have to see what emails/business/friends I’ve neglected or forgotten and reach out. Then I must clean and reorganize. This time it was my closet, moving around my “winter” clothes for my “summer” clothes (quotes intended, because in Tucson, they’re the same!). So. My life is back in order and it’s time to start thinking and writing again. I’ve tried to write while relapsing, and I can assure you that it is an exercise in foolishness, the writing wooden and the thoughts going nowhere. I still do it, if for nothing else but the entertainment of reading it later.
There are a few things I’ve discovered about my process, the main one is every single fucking time I think my brain is not going to come back. I grow impatient and start scolding myself. Thus the “give myself a good talking to” phase. It that an old-fashioned phrase? I’m sure I heard my mother say it and read it in books. I started using it once I left home, and had no one to do it for me. The voice is usually my mother’s, her pragmatic, tough view of getting on with it has served me well over the years. Not with Lyme, though, because the act of getting on with it is more complicated than buckling down and working harder. My brain is still warped while I’m doing said talking to and attempting to buckle down. Like old furniture, my brain takes time to warp, and more time to repair, the wood coaxed back to its former shape with pressure, clamps and glue. There is no rushing the process. Telling myself to get going again is my version of clamps and glue, applied liberally to quite literally straighten myself out.
Sometimes I wish there was a way to see what is happening inside my brain matter during relapse, recovery and periods of wellness. I imagine my brain swollen during relapses, the neural pathways squeezed so tightly they only partially function, and when they do, they misfire. During recovery, I see the pathways opening randomly at different rates, struggling to reestablish the known and familiar. It’s the wellness phase that I’m most curious about. Have some of those pathways been squeezed too hard by inflammation and been destroyed forever? On the other hand, I try not to think about this too deeply, because I’m not comfortable with the idea that every relapse invites a bit of destruction to what makes me myself.
I have a lot of freaky thoughts while my brain reawakens. I’m sure this is completely expected and considered normal by neurologists who study brain traumas, but man, is it weird. The good thing is that they are fleeting and not so weird that I worry about becoming permanently mentally ill. In fact, there is something exhilarating in knowing that all these strange manifestations are caused by an identifiable source. Katie likes to remind me of this frequently when I tell her I’m not thinking clearly.
“I’m not thinking right now and I can’t figure out why,” I say.
“Yes you do,” she says. “It’s your stupid fucking Lyme.”
Katie is the angel/devil on each shoulder and I am lucky to have such an uncensored voice. She doesn’t scold or sugar coat. She tells it like it is to me, as she has done her whole life, whether I want to hear it or like what I’m hearing. She also tells me to relax, I say this every time and every time I get better. This is far less guilt inducing than my mother’s voice. From now on Katie’s voice is the one I am going to strive to channel whenever I feel this urge to give myself a good talking to.
I don’t normally post links, but this very short article on the chronic-symptoms of those of us who continue to suffer from Lyme long after we’re “supposed” to is very good at explaining the experience in our society and healthcare system.
